Titt Street was in turmoil like an ant-hill that has been rooted up by
the ponderous hoof of a cow. Under the scattered street lamps, between
the parallel rows of two-storied, red-brick houses, groups of
wild-eyed men were talking. The pale light of the lamps showed the
drizzling rain falling like steam on their rough, dirty clothes, on
their thick-veined necks, on their excited faces, on their gnarled
hands that were raised in gesticulation. Their voices filled the
hollow darkness of the street with a hushed murmur, that rose and fell
turbulently, like the chattering of a torrent coming through rocks.
Their voices were nervous, as if they awaited a storm at sea.
Old women with shawls over their heads flitted about like shadows.
They darted from doorway to doorway, talking, making threatening
gestures at something remote, crossing themselves with their haggard
faces turned upwards to the sky. Young women walked arm-in-arm,
slowly, up and down the street. They looked at No. 44 as they passed
it, in silence, with awe in their open, red lips.
No. 44 was the centre of interest. The horror that had come to it had
aroused the whole street. It had aroused the whole quarter. Three
streets away, bar attendants stood gaping behind their counters, while
some man, with an excited red face and a big mouth, recounted the
manner of Frank McPhillip’s death, with oaths and frenzied
gesticulations. Everywhere, in the streets, in the public-houses, in
the tenement kitchens, where old red-nosed men craned forward their
shrivelled necks to hear the dreadful news, one word was whispered
with fear and hatred.
It was the word “Informer.”
Gypo heard that word as he reached the junction of Titt Street and
Bryan Road—a long wide road, lined with little shops, the sidewalks
strewn with papers, little heaps of dirt in the gutters, two tram-car
lines rusted by the drizzling rain, groups of loafers at every
lamp-post, at the public-house doors and on the Canal Bridge, where
the road disappeared abruptly over the horizon, as if it had fallen
over a precipice into space. He was passing Ryan’s public-house that
stood at the corner, half in Titt Street, half in Bryan Road. The word
came to him through the open door of the public bar. He had slowed
down his pace on reaching the neighbourhood and when he heard the word
uttered, he brought his left leg up to the right and instead of
thrusting it forward for another pace, he dropped it heavily but
noiselessly to the wet pavement of red and white glazed brick
diamonds, with which the front of the public-house was decorated.
A squall of wind came around the corner just then and buffeted him
about the body. He opened his mouth and nostrils. He distended his
eyes. He thrust forward his head and listened.
“There must ’a been information gev, ’cos how else could they—” a tall
lean man was saying, as he stood in the middle of the sawdust-covered
floor, holding a pint of black frothing porter in his right hand.
Then a burly carter, with a grey sack around his shoulders like a
cape, jostled the man who was speaking, in an awkward attempt to cross
the floor through the crowd. But the man had said enough. Gypo knew
that they were talking about the death of Francis Joseph McPhillip and
that they suspected that information had been given.
Again the idea came into his head that he must form a plan without a
moment’s delay. But the inside of his head was perfectly empty, with
his forehead pressing against it, hot and congested, as if he had been
struck a violent blow with a flat stick. The idea floundered about in
his head, repeating itself aimlessly, like a child calling for help in
an empty house. “No,” he muttered to himself, as he gripped his clasp
knife fiercely in his trousers pocket, “I can’t make out anythin’
standin’ here in the rain in front of a pub. Better go ahead.”
He hurled himself around the corner against the squall into Titt
Street with almost drunken violence. Then he realized with terror the
fate that menaced him if . . . He saw the groups under the lamp-posts.
He saw the flitting women. He saw the youths, hushed, strained,
expectant. He heard the rumble of human sound. The dark, sombre, mean
street that had been familiar to him until now, suddenly appeared
strange, as if he had never seen it before, as if it had suddenly
become inhabited by dread monsters that were intent on devouring him.
It appeared to him rather, that he had wandered, through a foolish
error of judgment, into a strange and hostile foreign country where he
did not know the language.
He glared about him aggressively, as he walked up the street. He
planted his feet on the ground firmly, walking with his legs wide
apart, with his shoulders squared, with his head thrust forward into
the wind like the jib boom of a ship.
As he was passing an open doorway somebody cried “hist.” He halted
like a challenged sentry. He wheeled savagely towards the doorway and
called out.
“Who are cryin’ hist after?”
“It’s only me,” chirped an old lady in a clean white apron, a woman he
knew well. “I thought ye were Jim Delaney, the coalheaver. I got to
whisper on account o’ me throat. I got a cold a fortnight ago,
scrubbin’ floors out at Clontarf, an’ it’s getting worse instead of
better. The doctor——”
But Gypo glanced angrily at her bandaged throat and her dim blue eyes
and passed on with a grunt without listening to her further. He
arrived at No. 44 and entered through the open door without knocking.
No. 44 was the most respectable house in the street. Its red-brick
front was cleaner than the other fronts. Its parlour window was
unbroken and was decorated with clean curtains of Nottingham lace. Its
door was freshly painted black. Its owner Jack McPhillip, the
bricklayer, had already begun the ascent from the working class to the
middle class. He was a Socialist and chairman of his branch of the
trade union, but a thoroughly respectable, conservative Socialist,
utterly fanatical in his hatred of the status of a working man. The
whole house was in keeping with his views on life. The door opened on
a little narrow hall, with the stair-way rising midway in it. The
stair-way was spotlessly clean, with brightly polished brass rods
holding down the well-washed linoleum carpet that struggled upwards
rigidly to the top of it. From the door, in daytime, the backyard
could be seen. In the backyard there were outhouses and stables, for
Jack McPhillip kept a yellow she-goat, three pigs, a flock of white
hens and a little pony and trap, in which he was in the habit of
driving out into the country on Sundays, in summer, with his wife, to
visit his wife’s relatives at Talmuc. To the right of the hall there
were two doors. The first door opened into the parlour. In the parlour
there was a piano, eight chairs of all sizes and sorts, innumerable
photographs, “ornaments,” and absolutely no room for anybody to move
about without touching something or other. The second door opened into
the kitchen, a large clean room with a cement floor, an open grate and
a narrow bed in the corner farthest from the door. The bed belonged to
old Ned Lawless, the epileptic relative of Mrs. McPhillip. He lived in
the house and received his meals and half a crown per week, in
exchange for his labours in looking after the backyard. He was never
clean, the only dirty thing in the house. On the second floor there
were three rooms. One was used by the old couple. The second by the
only daughter Mary, a girl of twenty-one who worked in the city as a
clerk, in the offices of Gogarty and Hogan, solicitors and
commissioners for oaths. The third room, opening on the backyard, had
been closed for six months. It had been Francis’s bedroom. That
evening he had just entered it to go to bed when the police arrived.
When Gypo entered, the house was crowded with neighbours who had come
in to sympathize. Some were even standing in the hallway. Gypo walked
through the hallway and pushed his way into the kitchen. Nobody
noticed him. He sat down on the floor to the left of the door, with
his back to the wall and his right hand grasping his left wrist in
front of his drawn-up knees. He sat in silence for almost a minute
waiting for an opportunity to speak to Mrs. McPhillip. He could see
her through the people in the room, sitting on a chair to the right of
the fire. She had black wooden rosary beads wound round and round her
fingers. There were tears in her pale blue eyes and streaming down her
great white fat cheeks. Her corpulent body flowed over the chair on
all sides like a load of hay on a cart. Her long check apron hid her
feet. She was looking dimly at the fire, murmuring prayers silently
with her lips. She nodded her head now and again in answer to
something that was said to her.
She held Gypo’s attention like a powerful magnet. Even when somebody
came between his eyes and her body, he stared through the intervening
body as if it were transparent. His eyes were centred on her forehead
and on her grey-white hair, that had a yellowish sheen at the top of
the skull where the parting was. He was thinking how good she had been
to him. She had often fed him. More precious still, she always had a
word of sympathy for him, a kind look, a tender, soft, smooth touch of
the hand on his shoulder! These were the things his strange soul
remembered and treasured. There were no others who were soft and
gentle to him like she was. Often when he and Francis came into the
house at dawn, after having done some revolutionary “stunt,” she used
to get up, in her bare fat feet, with a skirt drawn over her
night-dress. She used to move about silently with quivering lips,
cooking breakfast. It was a huge meal from her hands, an
indiscriminate lavish Irish meal, sausages, eggs, bacon, all together
on one plate.
And she would often press half a crown into Gypo’s hand when nobody
was looking, whispering: “May the Virgin protect ye an’ won’t ye look
after Frankie an’ see that he comes to no harm.”
“She is a good woman,” thought Gypo, impersonally, looking at her.
Then the kitchen emptied suddenly in the rear of a fat short man with
a pompous appearance, who wore a dark raincoat and a black bowler hat.
Every one made way for him going out the door and there were whispers.
Some scowled at him angrily, but it was obvious that everybody had a
great respect for him and envied him, even those that scowled at him.
He was an important Labour politician, the parliamentary
representative of the constituency that comprised Titt Street and the
surrounding slums. This important politician had been a bricklayer
with Jack McPhillip in his youth and Jack McPhillip was still his main
supporter.
When the politician had disappeared there were only five people left
in the room, other than Jack McPhillip and his wife. Three men in the
corner by the window, to the left of Gypo, had their heads close
together, whispering with that sudden intimacy that is born of the
presence of a calamity, or of something that has a common interest.
Gypo knew two of them. Two of them were members of the Revolutionary
Organization.
“That skunk Bartly Mulholland is here,” muttered Gypo to himself, “an’
that’s Tommy Connor with him. Mulholland is lookin’ for Frankie
McPhillip’s job on the Intelligence Department, I believe; an’ I
suppose that big stiff Connor is trainin’ to be his butty. Huh.”
Jack McPhillip sat on the narrow bed in the other corner, almost
opposite Gypo. He was talking to two women, who had chairs close to
the bed. They had pushed in to talk to McPhillip as soon as the
politician had left. They were nodding their heads and fidgeting, with
that amazing prodigality of emotion, which women of the very lowest
rung of the middle class ladder display, when in the presence of
members of the working class who are still _in puris naturalibus_. One
was the wife of the Titt Street “small grocer.” The other was the wife
of John Kennedy the lorry driver, who had just set up in business “for
himself.”
Jack McPhillip sat on the bed, with his right shoulder leaning against
the pillow. One foot was almost on the floor. The other foot was on
the bed. He held his right hand, palm outwards, in front of his face,
as if he were trying to drive away some imaginary idea, as he talked.
“There ye are now,” he was saying; “see what that man has done for
himsel’ in life. That’s what every man should aim at doin’, instead of
jig actin’ and endin’ up by bringin’ disgrace on his class an’ on his
family. Johnny Daly is a member o’ Parliament this day because he
spent any money and time he had to spare on his education. He looked
after his business and he did his best to educate and better the
condition of his fellow-men. That’s what every man should do. But my
son . . . I put him into a good job as an insurance agent an’ if he
had minded himself he’d be well on his way now towards a respectable
position in life for himself, but instead o’ that——”
Suddenly there was an amazing interruption that caused everybody to
start. Gypo had spoken in a deep thunderous voice that filled the
whole house.
“I’m sorry for yer trouble, Mrs. McPhillip,” he cried.
The sentence re-echoed in the silence that followed it. It had been
uttered in a shout. Gypo’s voice had suddenly broken loose from his
lungs into a spontaneous expression of the emotion that shook him into
a passion of feeling, looking at Mrs. McPhillip. He felt suddenly that
he must express that feeling forcibly. Not by a whisper, or a plain
restrained statement, but by a savage shout that would brook no
contradiction. The shout wandered about in the room long after its
sound had vanished. Nobody spoke. Its force was too tremendous.
Everybody, for some amazing reason or other, sniffed at the smell of
fried sausages that now permeated the atmosphere of the kitchen. The
smell came from the pan still left on the fireplace, containing the
sausages that had been cooking for Francis Joseph McPhillip’s supper
when the police came. He had been so tired that he told his mother to
bring his supper to him in bed. So they still remained there, on the
side of the fireplace, forgotten.
Then the initial amazement wore off and everybody looked at Gypo. They
saw him sitting on the floor, doubled up, bulky in his blue dungarees
that clung about his thighs like a swimming suit, with his little
round hat perched on his massive head, still staring at Mrs.
McPhillip’s face as if drawn by a magnet, unconscious of the amazement
he had caused by his shout.
And alone of all the people in the room, Mrs. McPhillip was not
amazed. She had not started. She had not moved her eyes. Her lips
still moved in prayer. Her mind was drawn by another magnet to the
contemplation of something utterly remote from the people in that
room, utterly remote from life, to the contemplation of something that
had its roots in the mystic boundaries of eternity.
Then Jack McPhillip jumped to a sitting posture on the bed. He grabbed
at the old tweed cap that had fallen off his grizzled grey head.
“Oh, it’s you that’s in it, is it?” he cried. “Ye son o’ damnation!”
He glared at Gypo so ferociously that his face began to twitch. His
face was so burned by the sun that it was almost black at a distance.
At close quarters it looked a reddish brown. He had a glass eye. The
other eye looked straight across the glass one, as if guarding it. He
had to look away from a man in order to see him. This distortion in
his vision had always filled his wife with terror, so that now she
trembled whenever he looked at her. It was so uncanny, his looking at
space like that. His body was short and slight. He was fifty years
old.
He jumped off the bed and stood on the floor in his grey socks, his
blue waistcoat unbuttoned, the little white patch of linen on the
abdomen of his grey flannel shirt puffing in and out with his heavy
breathing, his throat contorting, his hands gripping and ungripping
restlessly.
Mrs. McPhillip had awakened from her reverie as soon as her husband
spoke. She had started up and gripped her breast over her heart with a
dumb exclamation. Then she rubbed her two eyes hurriedly and looked at
him. As soon as she saw him, her eyes grew dim again and her body
subsided into the chair from which it had risen slightly.
“Jack,” she cried in an agonized voice, “Jack! Jack, leave him alone.
He was Frankie’s friend. He was a friend of me dead boy’s. Let him
alone. What’s done is done.”
“Be damned to that for a story,” cried Jack. His voice was weak and
jerky, just like the voice of his dead son. “A friend d’ye call him?
What kind of friend d’ye call that waster that never did a day’s work
in his life? That ex-policeman! He was even driven outa the police.
That’s fine company for yer son, Maggie. It’s the likes o’ him that’s
brought Frankie to his death an’ destruction. Them an’ their
revolutions. It’s in Russia they should be where they could act the
cannibal as much as they like, instead of leadin’ good honest Irishmen
astray. Why don’t they get out of here and go back to England where
they came from, with their rotten gold, gev to them be the Orangemen
to turn Ireland into an uproar, so that the Freemasons could step in
again and capture it. Ah-h-h-h, I’d like to get me fingers on yer
throat, ye——”
He was rushing across the floor at Gypo, but the three men had jumped
up and caught him. They held him back. Gypo stared at him, as if in
perplexity, without moving. But the muscles of his shoulders
stiffened, almost unconsciously. His eyes wandered slowly from the
fuming husband to the sobbing wife, who had again turned to the fire.
Then the people from the parlour rushed into the kitchen, attracted by
the shouting. They were headed by Mary McPhillip, the daughter of the
house. She was a handsome young woman, with a full figure, plump, with
red cheeks, a firm jaw, auburn hair cropped in the current fashion,
blue eyes that had a “sensible” look in them and a rather large mouth
that was opened wide by her excitement. Every bit of her except her
mouth belonged to an average Irishwoman of the middle class. The mouth
was a product of the slums. Its size and its propensity for disclosing
the state of the mind by exaggerated movement, which is the hallmark
of the slum girl, belied the neat elegance of the rest of the body and
of all the clothes. She was still dressed just as she had arrived from
the office, in a smart navy-blue costume which she had made herself.
The skirt was rather short, in the current fashion, and she stood with
her feet fairly wide apart, in the arrogant posture of a woman of good
family. Her well-shaped calves were covered with thin black silk
stockings. But she had her hands on her hips, unconsciously, as she
stood in front of the indiscriminate crowd that had followed her in
from the parlour, to find out what had caused the disturbance in the
kitchen.
“What’s the row about, father?” she said.
The accent was good, but a little too good. It was too refined. The
pronunciation of the words was too correct. It had not that careless
certainty of the born lady. She spoke in an angry tenor voice, in the
rich soft tones of the Midlands, her mother’s birthplace. Her voice
had the softness of butter, that voice which patriotic Irishmen always
associate with kindness and unassailable innocence and virtue, but
which is really the natural mask of a stern, resolute character.
“Aren’t we bad enough,” she continued, “without your acting like a
drunken tramp? Shut up and don’t disgrace yourself.” She stamped her
right foot and cried again: “Shut up.”
The father relaxed immediately. He began to tremble slightly. He was
very much afraid of his daughter. In spite of the power of
vituperation which he undoubtedly possessed, he had been afraid of
both his children. When Francis had become discontented and joined the
Revolutionary Organization, the father had poured out threats and
abuse for hours, almost every night, for the edification of his wife,
but when the son came in he said nothing. He was a weak, nervous
character, slightly hysterical, capable of committing any act on the
spur of the moment, but incapable of pursuing a logical course of
action resolutely. But his children were resolute. The son was
resolute in his hatred of existing conditions of society. He was a
resolute, determined revolutionary, with his father’s energy. The
daughter was resolute in her determination to get out of the slums.
The father slipped out of the hands of the men that were holding him
and moved backwards until he reached the bed. He sat down on it
without looking at it. He wiped his forehead with his sleeve although
it was perfectly dry. But it had a prickly feeling in it, as if scores
of needles had thrust themselves out from his brain through it. He
always felt like that when he got an attack of nerves, especially
since his son became a revolutionary, and it became known that his
activities were being watched at police headquarters.
He looked at his daughter, at first in a cowed fashion. He was afraid
of her, because she had become what he had urged her from her infancy
to become, “a lady.” He was afraid of her because she was so well
educated, because she had such “swell” friends, because she dressed so
well, because she washed herself several times a day, because she
spoke properly. But then he became irritated with all this and
remembered that he himself was a Socialist, the chairman of his branch
of the trade union, a political leader in the district, that all men
were free and equal and . . . all the pet phrases with which
respectable Socialists delude themselves into the belief that they are
philosophers and men of principle. He spoke with a ring of indignation
and of warning in his voice.
“Am I to be called a tramp by me own daughter in me own house,” he
cried, “when I tell this ruffian his true character? Yes, an’ every
other ruffian that’s the curse o’ the workin’-class movement with
their talk of violence an’ murder an’ revolution. All me life I have
stood straight for the cause of me fellow-workers. I was one o’ the
first men to stand up for Connolly an’ the cause o’ Socialism, but I
always said that the greatest enemies o’ the workin’ class were those
o’ their own kind that advocated violence. I . . .”
“I told you to shut up,” said Mary in a calm, low voice, as she walked
over to the bed, with her hands still on her hips. “It’s just like
you,” she almost hissed, putting her doubled fists into the little
pockets of her jacket. “It’s just like you to go back on your own
son.”
She did not know why she was saying this, but she felt some force
driving her on in opposition to her father, in defence of her dead
brother. Perhaps it was the audience she had behind her. Because,
strangely enough, she herself hated Frankie for belonging to the
Revolutionary Organization, since she got a position two years before
as clerk in the offices of Gogarty and Hogan. Before that she had been
a revolutionary herself, but not a member of any organization. She
used to attend meetings and cheer and get into arguments with
irritated old gentlemen, etc. But during the past two years her
outlook on life had undergone a subtle change, gradual but definite.
At first she began to get “disillusioned,” as she used to tell
Francis, with the blasé air of a young girl of nineteen. Then she used
to lecture him on the desirability of keeping better company. This was
at the time when she made the acquaintance of Joseph Augustine Short,
a young gentleman who was serving his apprenticeship with Gogarty and
Hogan and wore plus fours and left Harcourt Street Station every
Sunday morning, to play golf down the country somewhere. Finally, she
became opposed violently “to the whole theory of revolution,” as being
degenerating and “subversive of all moral ideas.” She became religious
and got the idea into her head that she could convert Commandant Dan
Gallagher, the leader of the revolutionary movement. All this later
development had been quite recent, however, and had not matured fully
in her character. It was yet merely plastic. It had not become a fixed
habit of thought, surrounded by deep and bitter prejudices, that form
themselves into “firm convictions.”
For that reason she had responded suddenly to that strange exaltation,
born of hatred for the law, which is traditional and hereditary in the
slums. The one glorious romance of the slums is the feeling of intense
hatred against the oppressive hand of the law, which sometimes
stretches out to strike some one, during a street row, during an
industrial dispute, during a Nationalist uprising. It is a clarion
call to all the spiritual emotion that finds no other means of
expression in that sordid environment, neither in art, nor in
industry, nor in commercial undertakings, nor in the more reasonable
searchings for a religious understanding of the universal creation.
“I stand by what Frankie has done,” she cried, turning to the people.
“I don’t agree with him in politics, but every man has a right to his
opinions and every man should fight for his rights according to . . .”
she got confused and stammered a little. Then she raised her hand
suddenly with an enthusiastic gesture and cried in a loud voice: “He
was my brother anyway and I’m going to stand up for him.”
Then she suddenly put her handkerchief to her nose and blew it
fiercely. There was a loud murmur of applause. The father made a
half-hearted attempt to say something, but he subsided. Mrs. McPhillip
was heard to mumble something, but nobody paid any attention to her.
Nobody noticed her except Gypo, who still sat on the floor staring at
her, fondling the memory of her past goodness to him, like a sumptuous
luxury that he must soon relinquish. Although he had been the cause of
all the excitement, he was now forgotten in the still greater
excitement, caused by the argument between the father and daughter of
the dead revolutionary.
Then Mary turned to Gypo and addressed him.
“If you were a friend of my brother,” she said, “you are quite welcome
here. Come into the parlour a minute. I want to talk to you.”
Gypo started and looked at Mary with his tufted eyebrows twitching
ominously like snouts. But he said nothing. She was embarrassed by the
uncouth stare and flushed slightly. She coughed in her throat and put
her fingers to her lips. She began to talk rapidly, as if apologizing
to the uncouth giant for having had the temerity to address him a
request.
“It’s because Frankie told us that he met you in the Dunboy Lodging
House before he came here. You are the only one he met in town before
he came in here, so I thought maybe that . . . you might be
able . . .”
She stopped in confusion, amazed at the startling change that had come
over Gypo. He had become seized by some violent emotion as she spoke
until his face contorted as if he were gazing at some awe-inspiring
horror. Then she stopped. His face stood still gaping at her. Then for
some reason or other he jumped to his feet, shouting as he did so at
the top of his voice: “All right.”
As he bent his head and the upper part of his body to jump to his
feet, his right trousers pocket was turned mouth to the ground. Four
silver coins fell to the cement floor with a rattling noise. These
coins were the change he had received in the public-house.
He was petrified. Every muscle in his body stiffened. His head stood
still. His jaws set like the teeth of a bear trap that has been sprung
fruitlessly. Behind his eyes he felt the delicious cold and congealed
sensation of being about to fight a desperate and bloody battle. For
he was certain that the four white silver coins lying nakedly, ever so
nakedly, on the floor, were as indicative of his betrayal of his
comrade as a confession uttered aloud in a crowded market-place.
Somebody stooped to pick up the coins.
“Let them alone,” shouted Gypo.
He swooped down to the floor and his right palm, spread flat, covered
the coins with the dull sound of a heavy dead fish falling on an iron
deck.
“I only wanted to hand them to ye, Gypo,” panted the weazened
flour-mill worker who had stooped to pick them up. He had been knocked
to his knees by Gypo’s swoop.
Gypo took no notice of the explanation. As he collected the coins in
his left fist and rose again, leaning on his right hand, he was
listening, waiting for the attack.
But there was no attack. Everybody was amazed, mesmerized by the
curious movements of the irritated giant. They stared with open
mouths, all except Bartly Mulholland and Tommy Connor, who stood in
the background, looking curiously at one another with narrowed eyes.
Darting his eyes around the room Gypo caught sight of the two of them.
Spurred by some sudden impulse he held up his right hand over his
head, he stamped his right foot, he threw back his head and shouted,
looking straight upwards:
“I swear before Almighty God that I warned him to keep away from the
house.”
There was a dead silence for three seconds. Then a perceptible shudder
ran through the room. Everybody remembered with horror that there was
a suspicion abroad, a suspicion that an informer had betrayed Francis
Joseph McPhillip. Informer! A horror to be understood fully only by an
Irish mind. For an awful moment each one present suspected himself or
herself. Then each looked at his or her neighbour. Gradually rage took
the place of fear. But it had no direction. Even the most daring
gasped when their minds suggested, that possibly the great fierce
giant might have had . . . Impossible!
“There’s no man suspects ye, Gypo. Ye needn’t be afraid of that,”
cried Tommy Connor, the huge red-faced docker with immense jaws like a
bullock, who had been whispering to Bartly Mulholland.
He had spoken spontaneously with a queer note of anger in his voice.
“Nobody suspects ye. Good God, man! . . .”
There was a chorus of agreement. Everybody was eager to assent to the
statement that Connor had made. Somebody put his hand on Gypo’s
shoulder and began to say: “Sure it’s well known that . . .”
But Gypo elbowed the man away fiercely and set out hurriedly across
the floor towards Mrs. McPhillip. He elbowed the people out of his way
without looking at them. He stood in front of Mrs. McPhillip. He
stared at her impassively for a few moments. Then he put his hand
slowly to his head and took off his hat. He felt moved by an
incontrollable impulse. All his actions had completed themselves
before his mind was aware of them. His mind was struggling along
aimlessly in pursuit of his actions, impotently deprecating them and
whispering warnings. But it was powerless.
This impulse that had possession of him now was of the same origin as
the one that controlled him when he was looking into the shop window
thinking of his youth.
He was beyond himself. His lips quivered. His throat got stuffed. He
swallowed his breath with an articulate sound, resembling a cry of
pain. He held out his left hand towards Mrs. McPhillip. He opened the
hand slowly. The four white silver coins lay there.
“Take it,” he muttered. “Ye were good to me an’ I’m sorry for yer
trouble.”
He felt a mad desire to pull out the roll of notes and give them to
her also, but the very thought of such a mad action made him shiver.
Instead he dropped the four coins into Mrs. McPhillip’s lap.
Mrs. McPhillip glanced at the money and then burst into loud sobs. The
sound maddened Gypo. He turned about and rushed towards the door. He
stubbed his foot against the door-jamb and hurtled into the hall. He
rushed along the passage, cursing and striking furiously at everybody
that came in his way. He stood outside the street door and breathed
deeply.
Two men rushed out after him. They were Bartly Mulholland and Tommy
Connor, the docker.